This is Google's major quandry with paid links. Tons of major publishers and brands are buying and selling links. If they make a real move to squash the market, their search results would shift dramatically, probably causing more harm than good in terms of SERP relevancy. So instead, Google just singles out the sites they want to punish and does so behind the scenes.

Congrats on the raise Rand...now get back to work! Seriously though, I think it's a good business decision to accelerate the growth of SEOmoz considering all of the momentum that you have created for your brand. I've long felt that for all of the thought leadership you folks provide, the company should be significantly larger and more profitable. On the other hand, it will be a sad day when SEOmoz gets gobbled up through acquisition. In the meantime, I'm sure that premium members will reap the rewards of SEOmoz's growth. September 18, 2007

I entered the fray in 2004 when I took on a business development role at a small B2B company. Cold calling was not what I wanted to spend my days doing, but I was responsible for driving new business. In writing a business plan for them, I recognized that their Web site was fairly hokey and their Web presence was weak. I convinced the owners to let me tweak the Web site and got a half hour html tutorial from our software engineer. After uploading all of the marketing and operational information that was fit to share on the Web and making the Web site look more corporate, the next logical step was to find a way to drive traffic. That’s when I started perusing forums, SEO Web sites, and maybe even a few blogs. Beyond WebmasterWorld, I couldn’t even name one site that I was getting info from at the time. As I recall, I was mainly doing Google searches on specific SEO topics and going from there. But overall, the advice was sound, as I was soon raking in commissions from Web-based leads. After seeing the power of SEO first hand (and the company I was working for being sold), I decided it was time to make a move, and join the SEM industry full time. Since then, I have learned gobs of new info from on-the-job training (thanks to Paul Bruemmer and the rest of RDIs search team) and from reading blogs posts from the likes of SEOmoz, Stuntdubl, Boykin, Bruce Clay, and the other 50 blogs that grace my G homepage.